


The Meanest Thing You Ever Did was Kiss Me

by StellarRequiem



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: I fluffed a little, M/M, Not too much, because you can tear this first kiss concept from my cold dead hands, but a little, mild/implied ca:cw spoilers, you can also tear Bucky's ptsd and how CA:CW must have affected him from said dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 07:23:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6972883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three kisses, beginning with Steve's first.</p><p>***</p><p>“But the actual kiss. What was that like? How’d you know what to do?”<br/>“I dunno, you just kind of . . . know. You put your mouths together and they just fit.”<br/>“That’s it? You just know?”<br/>“Yeah, Steve. It’s not too hard.”<br/>Steve shakes his head. Bucky sighs.<br/>“Look,” he says, “it’s like this, ok?”<br/>He says that, and nudges Steve’s chin with his closed hand, a gentle little punch. And when Steve looks up, Bucky bends down, and pushes his mouth right down onto his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meanest Thing You Ever Did was Kiss Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homesickblues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/gifts).



> This fic's title is borrowed from a song by the same name, written by Fats Waller. It was recorded in 1937, and would have been a hit around the time the first installment of this fic takes place. You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=191&v=uurLJj1ZocM

* * *

**Brooklyn**

* * *

 

“Dot let me kiss her.”

“What? When did that happen?”

Bucky shrugs, glances at the clock on the wall. He exhales airily, letting breath slip from between his lips, turning them momentarily plumper. Lips that have been kissed—Steve tries not to stare at them, searching for some change. He flicks his eyes back to the rest of Bucky’s face just in time for him to turn around.

“Two hours ago?” he says.

“And you’re just telling me now?”

“It’s been half an hour since you came over, Steve.”

“Still.  That’s . . .” Steve pauses, trying to find the word for the feeling slithering up into his chest. It wells in his stomach, churning, overflowing to constrict around his heart. It has no taste, no bitterness in his throat, but he swallows anyway. Bucky’s face, always so even and arguably cocky in its expression, softens. He’s growing into those expressions—at 15, his sterner looks are befitting of an adult. That quirk of his mouth might even be handsome.

“Oh, man,” he says, that half-smile, that always loving chastisement is on his face again, that look for some inexplicable reason never fails to calm Steve’s constantly racing, palpating heart, “don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

The slithering feeling constricts, hard. Steve chokes just a bit, and Bucky laughs.

“Shut up,” Steve mumbles. Bucky laughs some more, relaxing back on the couch. His eyes move to the grimy window, maybe remembering, and Steve wishes for a moment he could open up his head and watch what he’s seeing, play it like a film, like a newsreel in his head.

“What was it like?” he blurts. Bucky shrugs.

“It’s kind of hard to describe . . . sort of soft? Kinda wet? Her lipstitick felt weird.”

“But the actual kiss. What was that like? How’d you know what to do?”

“I dunno, you just kind of . . . know. You put your mouths together and they just fit.”

“That’s it? You just _know_?”

“Yeah, Steve. It’s not too hard.”

Steve shakes his head. Bucky sighs.

“Look,” he says, “it’s like this, ok?”

He says that, and nudges Steve’s chin with his closed hand, a gentle little punch. And when Steve looks up, Bucky bends down, and pushes his mouth right down onto his.

Steve’s heart freezes. It stops. Doesn't even skip, just halts mid-beat.

. . . right before it starts pounding _._

He waits for the inevitable lightheadedness to come, and it does, though it doesn’t feel like he's used to it feeling. It’s less faint and more airy, like the way it felt the time they’d stolen Mr. Barnes’ cigarettes, like he’s floating. The actual sensation of Bucky’s mouth is solid and real, though, even if everything else is suddenly evaporating.

It isn’t as warm as he’d have expected, at least not right away. Bucky’s lips are dry and no warmer or cooler than Steve’s, so they feel for a moment more like an extension of his own mouth than anything. The only thing that registers about them is the pressure—and then the movement. Bucky slides upward, lifting his chin so that his lips fit together as easily as puzzle pieces over Steve’s. His heart starts hammering again. Bucky’s mouth pinches over his upper lip and pulls a little, the sudden heat and humidity of the rest of his mouth hitting Steve all at once as he pulls away, an almost tug.

“See?” Bucky says, clearing his throat, “not hard.”

“Yeah . . . yeah, that’s not too bad. I think.” he wishes he didn’t sound so breathless.

“Come _on_ , Steve.”

“I just . . . it’s the movement. You . . .” Steve lets the sentence trail off, and swallows hard. “. . . I want to try.”

He doesn’t wait for Bucky to respond. He pops up from his slouch, sitting as upright as he can—Bucky is already so much taller than him—and leans in. Bucky lets him, although he stiffens for a second when Steve’s lips touch his, and Steve can hear him breathe in sharply as he mimics what Bucky had done to him.

It is indeed as instinctual as Bucky had suggested, and they do _fit_ together. Pulling back and taking Bucky’s plump lower lip with his feels a little strange, like it should be uncomfortable for Bucky, but maybe it isn’t. It had felt plenty fine to Steve, and Bucky’s reaction isn’t to just let him pull away, either. He chases after the motion, and closes his still-free top lip over Steve’s, that puzzle-piece fit again. And again. Steve tries to count the seconds—at least ten, though he rapidly loses track—their back and forth lasts. This kind of kiss is warmer. Wetter. Closer. It’s like they’re breathing each other.

And it keeps going. Steve clenches his fists in his lap, resisting the urge to reach out and pull Bucky’s face a little closer, maybe lay a hand out over his increasingly broad shoulder, maybe find out what his hair feels like since he’s started slicking it back—

Down the hall, the door creaks.

Bucky yanks away and hurtles himself backwards so fast that Steve falls momentarily forward before scrambling to recover himself.

When Mr. Barnes walks in, they’re sitting so far apart from each other, crammed into opposite arms of the couch, that Steve feels more ridiculous than anything. Mr. Barnes ignores them. As he moves into back bedroom, Steve glances at Bucky: his friend just shrugs.

“Now you know,” he says, voice low enough to keep his father from hearing. Steve nods.

“Yeah. It is easy.”

“I told you.”

“Kind of wet.”

Bucky scrunches his face up, wrinkling his nose. “Yeah.”

“You probably get used to it,” Steve says.

“Yeah.”

_We could find out._

Steve never lets the thought leave his mouth. He doesn’t even get the chance to. Bucky clears his throat and straightens out on the couch, and stretches.

“Want a soda?” he asks. He stands to get one before Steve can even answer.

 

* * *

**Germany**

* * *

 

Bucky is a little drunk when he follows Steve out of the bar where he’d discovered the hard way—having _tried_ to be drunk for the first time in a while just to celebrate—that his new body won’t allow it. Bucky had done most of the drinking for him, instead. Understandable, seeing as he’d spent the last several weeks being confined and tortured. He doesn’t talk about how, or why. Steve doesn’t ask him to.

“Done for the night?” Steve asks, catching him as he stumbles.

“Gotta be,” he slurs. “I’m following that kid from Brooklyn now, remember?”

“You don’t have to follow me to _bed_.”

“Nope, but I might anyway. I can’t remember the last time I slept right. And God knows you know how to drag my drunk ass home.”

Steve chuckles. “I did it enough times when we were younger. Remember that time we stole that bottle of Scotch from your dad?”

“And we drank it on the fire escape, and you had to try and drag me back in through the window?”

“Yeah, that time. I was sore for a week.”

“Cause you were still all . . .”

“Skinny? Frail?”

“Fifteen.”

“Good save.”

Bucky shrugs, and falls into Steve, collapsing against his side and slinging an arm around his neck. He used to do that sometimes, though back then, he hadn’t had to reach up to do it. Steve reaches up to take his hand so as to keep him from sliding away. Having him like this, so close, Steve can smell him—boozy and sterile, as if he’d scrubbed away more than filth when he’d taken his first shower in who knows how long earlier this morning. His fingers close around Steve’s.

“Come on,” Steve says. “Let’s get you a bed.”

“Good plan.”

Bucky could probably have walked on his own in any state but the weakened one he’s in, but as it is, he clings to Steve all the way back to his bunk, releasing his hand only when Steve slides his shoulder out from under him and drops him down onto the mattress. Bucky groans.

“Shit,” he says. “I missed mattresses.”

“I can imagine,” Steve says. Bucky glances up at him. “Well . . . maybe not.”

“You stick around us and you’ll get used to sleeping anywhere that’s flat, too.”

Steve laughs. “That’s the idea.”

Bucky smiles. That half smile. The one that Steve feels all over his body, and deep in his chest, though his heart rate, these days, doesn’t need any help regulating itself. He can’t remember the last time he felt the flutter of a palpitation of the head-rush of a faint any more than he can remember the last time the asthma choked him up.

For a moment, there’s quiet. Nothing spoken but that smile. And then it fades.

“You remember that day I taught you how to kiss?” he says. He’s a touch too drunk to be quiet about it, but there’s no one else around to hear, anyway.

“How could I forget?”

The smile cracks across his face again.

“You know what you never asked?”

There were _plenty_ of things Steve had never asked, seeing as they never spoke of it again. But all he says is “what?”

“How to know when to do it.”

“I guess I thought it’d be as easy as the rest of it.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. And he stands. He wavers in front of Steve for a moment, ignoring the door that Steve is eyeing over his shoulder. It’s not that this never happens. There are guys—no one really talks about it, but people know, and most just ignore it—guys that mean they wouldn’t be the first. But the others who don’t ignore it . . . Steve could take them. Whether Bucky could if they got him alone, if there were a lot of them, he’d rather not bet on.

“Bucky . . . You’re drunk,” Steve says, swallowing hard.

“Yep,” he says, and he falls forward into Steve, a hand against his chest, his faced turned up to kiss the corner of his mouth, just once, before collapsing back into bed.

 

* * *

**Siberia**

* * *

 

“That girl, Dot. What do you think she’d say if she could see me now?”

It’s the first thing Bucky has said other than “I’m fine,” since they boarded the quinjet. He hasn’t looked fine, doubled over with what’s left of his arm still smoldering, but it’s the only response he’s offered.

“Buck—”

“I shouldn’t have run from Stark.”

Steve sets the jet to autopilot and turns to look at Bucky. He’s staring out the window, straight ahead, something utterly hollow and terrible in his eyes, his right arm wrapped around his stomach. His voice—it isn’t broken, but it’s so close. So raw. So tired and so raw. The kind of voice that doesn’t remember how to smile around the words, even humorlessly. Up until now, he’s been able to manage at least that much.

“He was going to kill you.”

“Exactly. I should have let him. But no—I just can’t seem to stop surviving.”

“ _Good.”_

Bucky looks to tired when he finally turns to look back at Steve. He doesn’t want to hear this—he doesn’t want to—

“Is it?” he asks. So, so tired. So empty.

“Of course it is. Look, Bucky—” Steve turns all the way around in his chair, pushing back the arm rest so that he can swing his legs around, “just knowing you’re alive is more than I could have ever asked for.”

Bucky snorts.

“You call this living?”

“You gotta forgive yourself, Buck. None of what you did was you. But as long as you hold it against yourself, no. It isn’t living. And you deserve more than that.”

Bucky shakes his head.

“I got one life,” he says. “It was short, yeah. But so were most soldiers’.”

“Mine too, but we got a second chance.”

Bucky looks back at the window, at the blank whiteness of Siberian cloud cover.

“I keep trying to believe that for you,” he whispers.

“Don’t believe it for me. Believe it for you.”

Bucky has nothing to say to that. Silence reigns for so long that Steve has to turn around again, feeling strange about facing Bucking head-on for too long. At his face, which did turn out handsome, and at his eyes, which grew so sad.

“How can you care this much?”

Bucky speaks at a near whisper Steve almost misses. His stomach lurches.

You were my best friend,” he says. “. . . And maybe more than that.”

Bucky doesn’t turn around too look at him. But he stiffens in his chair.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Steve steals himself.

“You remember who your first kiss was?”

“No.”

“It was Dot.”

Bucky glances at him sideways, a wariness taking over his eyes as a memory ignites.

“And then it was you. You were jealous.”

Steve nods.

“Yeah, I was. But not of you.”

Bucky stills. He goes so stiff in his chair he seems flash-frozen, as if he isn’t even breathing.

“Steve,” he finally says. There's hardly any air behind the word. “I—”

“I know. I'm not asking you for anything, Buck. I wouldn't. I know you've got enough going on in your head already. But you asked, so you deserve to know.”

Bucky shakes his head.

“It's not just that. I'm not sticking around after this.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I want to find a way to go back under. And if we're going to Wakanda . . .  well, if anyone has the technology for that, I'm guessing I can find it there.”

A hundred things collide against the front wall of Steve's mind, all these things he can or should say, but none of it will come out. Which Bucky seems to appreciate. What does finally come out, almost a full minute later, is “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Bucky nods. “I know.” And a minute after that, “. . . I'm sorry.”

 

* * *

 

**Wakanda**

* * *

 

It's Tony that finally figures it out. Steve gets the distinct impression from the act that it's meant more for him than Bucky, but he'll take it. When they wake Bucky up, he accepts it, too.

The idea is surprisingly simple: Undoing HYDRA brainwashing without knowing how they got into Bucky's head in the first place is more than they have the tools to do in any way that isn’t just as likely to melt Bucky's brain down entirely. But what they can manipulate are his memories of the process. Stark's proposal is to supplant those memories with new ones. Nothing major—too much, and his mind might reject it—but a few simple words. A few random words utterly unlikely ever to appear in sequence, in multiple languages. Bucky helps to choose them, so he'll recognize the pattern should anyone ever uncover it: A new code. One not written into HYDRA’s annals. One that no one could look up to use against him, that could nullify his old one.

Implanting the new memory, according to Tony, is easy. It's testing it that’s nerve wracking.

Bucky's seat for the process is one massive vibranium restraint. Both his arms, including his newly restored, still-metal left arm, are pinned behind his back, and his back, in turn, is pinned to the chair. A chest harness, and metal at his waist and around his legs complete the restraints. A Wakandan nurse stands by with a tranquilizer.

Steve is the one who says the old words—the test.

“Желание.” Longing.

Bucky closes his eyes. Breathes deep. Steve's stomach churns.

“Ржавый.” Rusted.

Bucky clenches both fists.

“Семнадцать. Рассвет. Печь. Девять. Добросердечный.” Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign.

Bucky is breathing hard, audibly, his chest pressing against the restraints. Lungs desperate to fill. Steve stops. Bucky speaks through his teeth:

“Keep going.” Steve wants so badly to protest. “Keep going!”

“В-возращение на родину. Один.” Homecoming. One.

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. He's mouthing something silently Steve can't make out.

“Грузовой вагон.”

Freight car. Words that mean nothing. Words that mean everything.

Bucky opens his eyes.

“Солдат?” Steve asks.

Bucky says nothing. He looks up, slowly, raising his head in increments to look at Steve. And then it starts, weak and barely present, a laugh. It grows louder by the second, not hysterical, not yet, but it has a sound like something breaking, maybe breaking through.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

“It worked.”

Steve lunges—nearly collapses—toward the chair Bucky is confined to, working over the restraints from the feet up. Bucky's hands are still behind his back when he has to pause to breathe, to process. A glance sideways reveals he's eye level with Bucky, the way he's bent over him. And Bucky is watching him, breathing hard. From so close. Steve tries to stop himself from leaning in. He shouldn’t do this. Bucky just woke up. He just learned he's free for the first time in seventy years. He just—

Bucky lurches forward in his chair and catches Steve's mouth with his at the exact moment that Steve surrenders and leans into him.

They collide, a touch too rough, nothing like the other kisses Steve remembers from over the years. It's not curious. It's not tired. It's not chaste. It's not pretending to mean something it doesn’t. It just is: hard, warm, washing Steve in a relief so palpable that he's sure his heart stops, dropping him into suspended animation once again. It's a relief almost like calm, although his hands, on either side if Bucky's face, pulling him close and holding him there, are quite the opposite. His fingertips snag on Bucky's hair. When Bucky pulls away, Steve's palms are still cradling his face.

“This would be easier if you let me out if the handcuffs,” he says. Steve snorts.

“Good to have you back, Buck.”

Steve reaches behind him, and doesn’t lean back again once Bucky's hands are free. He stays there, close, weighing all the ways he could close the space between them, studying Bucky's chapped mouth.

“You know, I think there might be something I forgot to teach you,” Bucky says, reading his intent.

Steve nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “How to stop.”

Steve kisses him again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> One additional note: This is my first ever stucky fic, so thank you for reading and please feel free to leave comments!


End file.
